Nobody adds it up. That is the first thing to understand, and it is not an accident.

You buy fuel the way you buy recharge. Four thousand here, five thousand there. It leaves your
hand in small pieces, and small pieces do not feel like money. So the total never assembles
itself into a number you have to look at.

Let us assemble it now. It takes two minutes and it is the most expensive two minutes you will
spend this week.

Ten litres a night, and what that comes to by December

Take an ordinary 3.5kVA petrol generator, the kind in most compounds. Run it overnight, call it
eight hours, and it drinks about ten litres. That is not our figure. The manufacturers publish
it, and you will find it on the listing for whatever is sitting outside your window.

At the pump today, ten litres is a little over thirteen thousand naira. For one night. Not to
own anything, not to build anything. To pass one night and wake up needing to do it again.

The only question left is how often. Be honest and pick your line.

How often you run it Per week Per year Over five years
Every night 91,700 4,768,400 23,842,000
5 nights a week 65,500 3,406,000 17,030,000
3 nights a week 39,300 2,043,600 10,218,000
2 nights a week 26,200 1,362,400 6,812,000

Those are naira, at petrol prices as we write this in September 2026. Even the bottom row, the
person who fires it up twice a week when NEPA really tests them, is spending over a million
naira a year on fuel that is gone by morning. The top row is nearly five million. Every year.
Forever.

Look at the last column, because that is the one that should stop you. Five years on the top
row is almost twenty four million naira. That is a house deposit, going up one jerrycan at a
time, while you tell yourself it is normal.

The figure at the end of your row has a name in this guide. It is your number.

The costs that never send you an invoice

The fuel is only the bill you notice.

Servicing. The AVR that goes. Plugs, oil, the starter, each one arriving as an inconvenience
rather than a plan, always on a weekend, usually when you need the thing most.

Then there is the bill nobody prices at all. The sleep you lose at 2am when it trips off and
the room turns into an oven. The fumes you have stopped smelling. The noise you have trained
yourself not to hear, and the neighbour who never managed to. Carrying a jerrycan through the
dark at eleven at night, and the small calculation you make about who is watching. The
tightening in your chest every time somebody says the word scarcity.

You have absorbed all of it and decided it is the cost of living here.

It is not just you

In 2023, Nigerians spent sixteen and a half trillion naira generating their own power. That is
the Minister of Power’s own figure. In the same year the entire formal power sector earned
about one trillion. We are spending sixteen times more to escape the problem than the problem
costs to run.

It is not only households either. The Manufacturers Association of Nigeria puts what its
members spent on alternative energy in 2025 at one point three four trillion naira, up more
than seventy per cent in two years. Factories, with accountants whose entire job is to find a
cheaper way.

And by the government’s own numbers, electricity from a petrol generator works out at about
four hundred and fifty naira per unit. Band A supply, the good stuff people pay a premium for,
is two hundred and nine naira fifty kobo. You are not saving money by running that generator.
You are paying more than double for worse power, with worse sleep.

Why solar has failed so many Nigerians, and why it was almost never the solar

You know somebody it did not work for. Possibly it was you.

The job looked fine at first. Then the battery started swelling. Then the night stopped
reaching morning. Then the generator came back out, and the conclusion was that solar does not
work in this country.

That is not what happened. What failed was the sizing and the installation, and the two are
almost always the same story: the cheapest quote won. The guide walks through the timeline of
a bad job step by step, because once you can recognise it, you can refuse it before you pay
for it.

It is not your fault, and it is not a reason to stay with the generator. It is a reason to be
harder to sell to.

Why sizing decides everything

Two things get undersized, and they fail differently.

Undersize the battery and the night runs out. Undersize the panels and a week of Port Harcourt
cloud does the same job more slowly. Get both right and the whole question of whether you will
make it to morning simply stops being a question you think about.

This is also why we will not quote you properly over the phone. Anybody who does is guessing,
and their guess becomes your problem about four months later.

You do not need millions sitting in the bank

This is the objection that stops most people, and it is worth answering plainly.

Deposits start as low as ten per cent depending on which partner, and repayment runs from six
months up to two years. Which means the comparison is not the system against your savings. It
is the repayment against your number, the money you are already spending every week on fuel
that is gone by morning.

For a lot of homes those two figures are uncomfortably close. That is the whole argument.

What is inside the guide

  • The real arithmetic, laid out so you can find your own number in about two minutes
  • Why solar has failed so many Nigerians, and why it was almost never the solar
  • The timeline of a bad install, so you can spot one before you pay for it
  • The truth about sizing, and why the cheapest quote is usually the one that sends you back to the pump
  • What it takes to run an entire house, ACs and freezers included, without an engine in the compound
  • How people are paying for it without millions in the bank
  • Ten questions to ask any installer before you pay them a naira
  • The fuel worksheet, so you can put your own numbers against it

Written by the team who design, supply and install these systems for homes, businesses and
government offices across Nigeria, and who run their own homes on the same equipment.

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straight answer whether you buy from us or not.